What could I say next? In life, occasionally there are moments that can only be characterized as sublime, serendipitous. Moments when you say or do absolutely the right thing. Like when Babe Ruth, with two strikes on him, pointed to the stands beyond the outfield and batted the next pitch there for baseball’s most unforgettable home run, or when Churchill, answering an obese woman who had just called him a drunkard, responded, “Madam, you are fat, and I am indeed inebriated, but tomorrow I shall be sober.” In these situations, where great men do absolutely the right thing at the right moment, you have to call that sublime.

There are times, however, when complete idiots, against all odds, and in contradiction to all previous history, deliver in the same spectacular way. Like when the fat kid who struck out all year hits a grand slam homer in the bottom of the ninth to win the series, or when the klutz in left field not only gets a near and sure home run ball, but actually catches it and holds on despite crashing into the fence and being knocked almost unconscious. These moments are not just sublime, they’re miraculous. Your life is sometimes irrevocably altered once you experience one. I was about to experience exactly such an unlikely moment.

I, of course, had never seen or heard of Gentileschi’s Joseph Fleeing Potiphar’s Wife. Norman Rockwell and the Mona Lisa were all I knew about art. (In fact, I’m not even sure who it was who painted the Mona Lisa, though I’m fairly sure it wasn’t Rockwell.) I did love my grandmother, however. I loved her company, her cooking, her house—everything about her. In fact, as a kid, I spent so much time in her apartment I knew every inch of the place: where the cans were stored, where the washboard was kept, what chairs were worn out in the arms under the seat covers. I not only knew where things were, I knew everything about them because I asked questions incessantly. Thus, I knew how my grandfather had bought my grandmother her bureau, how to do the wash on a scrub board, why you got more vitamins if you squeezed the oranges fresh on Aunt Anna’s glass squeeze from California, and other such trivia.

The material centerpiece of my grandmother’s home was a huge glass-covered tapestry that hung over the living room couch that a long-dead cousin had given to my grandmother as thanks for her hospitality when my grandmother took in her family during the Depression.

If you guess that this tapestry depicted Joseph fleeing Potiphar’s wife, you would be correct. If you also guess that I’d spent hours staring at it growing up so that it was undoubtedly the only piece of art in the world I could easily re-create from memory, you’d be right again. It was, of course, extremely unlikely that this tapestry had anything whatsoever to do with Gentileschi, but it just might. Insanely, I decided to risk it all and bring the conversation back to art.

“That’s not the painting where Potiphar’s wife is clinging to Joseph’s scarlet cloak as he is fleeing the bed?” I asked.

Cohen turned to me, a look of total shock on his face. “You know the painting?” he asked almost reverently.